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“... things he wished he could do – ‘a dozen Chekhov-Shakespeare novels’, as one of his editors, Robert Phelps, summarised a characteristic resolution; a life of Jesus; a novel about the atom bomb – were to become an almost public constituent of his writing life. His criticism is marked by the same mixture of yearning and disappointed hopes. Agee’s ...”

“... lastyear of the great forerunner’s life. Stieglitz’s face has a weary look not unlike that of Robert Flaherty, father of the documentary film, another great forerunner whose portrait Cartier-Bresson took in the same year. A similar weariness infuses the faces of Georges Rouault and Pierre Bonnard in their 1944 portraits; but the relationship between these ...”

“... her novels about Cyril (who for some unaccountable reason Spufford thinks is called Hugh), Anthea, Robert and Jane and their magical adventures. The first is Five Children and It (1902) – the fifth child being their baby brother; ‘It’ being the Psammead, or sand fairy, a creature that looks a bit like a monkey with eyes on stalks, can grant a wish a day ...”

“... in are Singing in the Rain and West Side Story rather than films starring Ginger Rogers or Judy Garland or Rita Hayworth or Barbra Streisand, or films choreographed by Busby Berkeley, with his unique combination of low popular appeal and high cinematic art. Thomson is passionately anti-middlebrow: The loveliness of Merchant-Ivory gives me the creeps. Their ...”

“... is compelled to treat as a second nature. This claim, too, had been made first in architecture, by Robert Venturi: ‘The main justification of the honky-tonk elements in the architectural order is their very existence. They are what we have.’ Eventually, Post-Modernism itself would be given a honky-tonk logo and shorthand promo: around 1992, its friends and ...”

“... much of Welles’s compulsive womanising, the affairs with Dolores del Rio, Rita Hay-worth, Judy Garland, Eartha Kitt, Paola Mori, Oja Kodar and a host of ballerinas and showgirls. Immediately after shooting had finished on The Magnificent Ambersons, Welles flew to Rio de Janeiro to work on a government-sponsored documentary. When called back to Hollywood ...”

“... But as Russell Banks points out in the preface to The Hurly Burly, Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Bowen, Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg had led a campaign on Coppard’s behalf. In the 1970s, he had another revival in the UK after a couple of his stories were adapted for television and Lessing put together a selection. But by the 1980s, in the Dirty Realist era of ...”

“... poems in Parnassus, Emerson’s 1872 anthology of American poets. It took an English journalist, Robert Buchanan in the London Daily News, to publicise the complaints already made by William Rossetti and other English literati: that America was barbarously disdaining its greatest poet. But this rescue operation only made matters worse at home, when the ...”

“... art studies Maude Phelps McVeigh married the precocious, prodigious, ‘collar-ad handsome’ Robert Maynard Hutchins, a brilliant young teacher and law student who became secretary to the Yale Corporation in 1923 at the age of 24. In 1928, soon after receiving his law degree and a professorship, he was made dean of the Law School – the youngest in Yale ...”

“... in war movies.) Other readers will think (appropriately, too) of moralised adventure novels, like Robert Louis Stevenson’s; of comics, with their arrangements of panels and captions; and of photography. Freddy begins the poem by showing us snapshots, tokens of the domestic life he spends most of the poem longing for: That was sausage day on our farm outside ...”

“... satire and after. He asks me if we ever had any alternative titles to Beyond the Fringe, which was Robert Ponsonby’s contribution and not popular with us at the time. I can’t think of any but J. Miller later remembers ‘At the Drop of a Brick’, a reference to Flanders and Swann’s At the Drop of a Hat and Peter Cook’s suggestion that we call it ...”

“... recall, he was full of exhortations about art and entertainment and stories about his best friend, Robert Redford, who had starred in his latest film. His second home, he told me, was in Utah, near Redford’s. He got there by aeroplane, his own, of course, which he also piloted. ‘I’m confident we’re going to have something good,’ he said at the end of ...”

“... too.’ Even his admirers could find it a strain: ‘He is not an easy man to be yourself with,’ Robert Louis Stevenson confessed to Henry James, ‘there is so much of him, and the veracity and the high athletic intellectual humbug are so intermixed.’ Hardy wrote loyally after Meredith’s death that ‘His words wing on – as live words will,’ but ...”

“... despite his image: the first time I went to see him he recommended I go to a bar that had a Judy Garland impersonator. When I got to his house this second time, Norman was sitting at his dining table looking wiry and small. He walked with two sticks and was six months from death. He was reading the New York Times and circling things: he had on one of those ...”

“... had been worn out only by student travels to Paris and Heidelberg and, almost certainly, Italy. Robert Tracy gives an account of the main influences in the air at the time of Mandelstam’s first book, Stone, here translated in toto into rhymed verse, with a parallel Russian text, an excellent introduction and very illuminating notes. Tracy evokes the world ...”